Infographic: The Fastest Way to Make More Money on eBay

Every seller wants to make more money on eBay. Most go for the obvious and try to hunt down the hottest new products, negotiate lower prices with suppliers, or optimize their listings. But many don’t realize the fastest route to better profits is simply providing better customer service.

Hard to believe? Maybe, but this infographic proves it:

Why Is Improving Customer Service the Best Way to Make More Money on eBay?

When you take your eBay customer service up a notch, it creates a massive avalanche effect. Small changes like better detailed seller ratings snowball into noticeable improvements like better search rankings and higher engagement. The effects keep building on each other and result in a cascade of higher sales and bigger profits.

One of the biggest improvements, of course, is becoming a Top Rated Seller. This allows you to create Top Rated Plus listings to slash your final value fees and simultaneously improve customer trust. In other words, you pay less to sell more.

The many ways in which better customer service improves your Best Match search rankings are also tremendously helpful. The recent addition of Grouped Listings has created an eBay Buy Box similar to Amazon’s, which ladles massive amounts of attention onto whoever ranks at the top of Best Match. Ranking high matters more than ever—so customer service does, too.

How Can I Improve My Customer Service?

It’s easy to look at information like this and say, “OK, I’ll do better.” But more often than not, when you reexamine your business a week, a month, or a year later, you realize you haven’t made any changes. Things are the same as always—or have even worsened as your business has grown and become more difficult to manage.

Make a concrete action plan now. Then follow up on it.

Here are a few real ways to improve your eBay customer service today:

Get a Helpdesk

eBay’s customer service tools are woefully inadequate for high-volume support. Helpdesks like Zendesk, Freshdesk, Help Scout, Gorgias and Re:amaze provide massively powerful tools for speeding up support and better managing your team. And all you need to connect them to eBay is ChannelReply.

Provide Better Training

Improving your team’s knowledge of shipping, relevant rules, laws and policies, your products, and other info that affects you and your customers will allow them to provide better answers faster. Improving communication skills can also prevent misunderstandings and improve customer satisfaction.

Don’t have a team? Train yourself! Attend a business communication course, dogfood the products you sell, or memorize carrier policies. And don’t skimp on learning to use your helpdesk’s features well.

Training may seem like a big investment now, but payoff is practically guaranteed over time. Don’t underestimate it.

Expand Hours/Team

Every business that can afford it should aspire to provide 24/7 customer service. Expanding your team to cover more of the clock and answer questions faster can have a dramatic impact. If you run an international business, this is even more important, as problems can take days to solve over email if your team is never available when your customers are awake.

Response time and resolution time are among the most important metrics in customer service. Improving availability improves both.

Happier Customers Mean More Money

You don’t have to gain immense purchasing power or resort to weird tricks to earn more on eBay. All you have to do is provide better customer service. Connect a helpdesk to eBay with ChannelReply, train your agents effectively, and expand your hours if you can, and your profits are almost certain to rise.